1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology of electronically processing an annotation handwritten on paper, and more particularly to a technology of processing an annotation according to geometric properties thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
An annotation is often handwritten on a paper material, such as a document or a drawing, in order to record notes, correct description in the document, or for other purposes. Although such a handwritten annotation is perhaps usually intended for personal use only, there are times when a person may wish to share the annotation with other people, depending on the nature of the document and the purpose of the annotation. For example, if presentation materials displayed at a conference are printed and distributed to participants in the conference, participants may make annotations on the distributed presentation materials. In such cases, it can be of great benefit to share the annotations among the participants.
As one example, the shared use of handwritten annotations is enabled by handling the handwritten annotations on a document converted into electronic form by scanning of the document. Handwritten annotations, however, have a wide variety of geometries, sizes, and locations, which can pose a problem in that handwritten annotations are more difficult to handle than are electronically input annotations. Therefore, handwritten annotations are usually personally kept by each of the participants and not effectively shared among the participants.
For example, in the case of the above-described conference materials, because annotations are often written in the margin of the conference materials, a document portion originally contained in the conference materials must be scaled down to entirely display scanned conference materials on the screen. Further, in such conference materials, multiple participants can make annotations simultaneously on different sheets of the conference materials. If these multiple pages are simply scanned, plural independent files would be created without any link organically connecting the files. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to share the personally-made annotations among the participants. In addition, there is another problem that no adequate scheme has yet been established for handling a situation where a personally-made annotation is not wanted to be disclosed to public.